Hello again
by ceroxon
Summary: After cracking his head on the pond Ranma is convinced he's a girl. For weeks Akane and the fathers tried everything to get her to become a boy, making her nervous and depressed. Finally having enough Genma threatens to disown her but she cant change and runs. Akane chases her and sees Ranma crying, the weeping of a soul beyond hope.


snowhare (Snowhare)

Much thanks goes to the FFML. Their comments have greatly improved this story.

This story is based on the anime episode "Am I...Pretty? Ranma's Declaration of Womanhood" from Ranma 1/2. All characters are based on characters created by Takahashi Rumiko, who holds the copyrights on Ranma 1/2. This fanfic is my original creation and its copyright is mine.

"Hello Again" by Benjamin Franz

**NA: Not my fanfic (Ceroxon). I found it on old website.**

She wept soundlessly into the night beneath the bridge, hugging her knees against her chest for the pain from inside, unaware of the presence of the second girl - who's own emotions were less than steady. The thoughts that flowed through her head would have been familiar to either of them, if they had been spoken aloud: 'That incredible jerk! How could he?! Why couldn't they understand how she felt?' The tears streaked silently down the cheeks of the small redhaired girl, sitting there on the bank of the river.

Akane's eyes brimmed with unspilled tears as she gripped Ranma's shoulders and looked directly into her eyes.

"Ranma, change back! I don't care if you are rude and insensitive. I complain a lot, but this isn't you! If you stay like this, who will I...what will I..." The sentence trailed into silence, leaving the ambiguous questions hanging in the dark air of Akane's bedroom.

Ranma looked up at Akane, her eyes pleading for understanding, the height difference, as always, reversed when Ranma was in her girl form. 'I...know how you feel, but this is who I am. The male Ranma you knew doesn't really exist anymore.'

The flare of anger from Akane formed an almost visible aurora around her, 'You idiot! You aren't Ranma at all! If you are going to be that way, you can stay a girl forever as far I care!' The attack with the wooden sword missed, whether because Akane wasn't as serious about killing Ranma as she appeared or because of Ranma's remarkable speed in avoiding the strikes undetermined. Regardless, they quickly moved through the dojo and outside by the fishpond as Akane expressed her frustration in a relentless assault and Ranma continuously dodged.

Ranma never saw the rock she tripped over. The unexpected backwards tumble into the fishpond, and the crack of her skull against the rock edge of the pool for the second time that day seemed quite loud in the quiet of the night.

'Ranma!'

Doctor Tofu had left, and a subdued Akane sat on her folded legs next to the still unconscious Ranma as Kasumi replaced the moist folded cloth on Ranma's forehead. Doctor Tofu had said that the concussion didn't appear life threatening, but that Ranma should definitely take it easy for the next week, and that if he experienced any dizzyness or lose of balance the next day, he should come into the clinic.

Akane sat silently watching the softly breathing Ranma and tried to sort her thoughts, but they insisted on repeating again and again the moment when she saw Ranma trip backwards and knew that Ranma was going to crack her head on the rocks, again.

What utterly shamed her was the flash that had shot through her head in that instant hoping that the fall would kill Ranma, only then followed by the horrified realization that it might really kill him. It had a wierd kind of symmetry for the day - she was spending her evening as she had spent her morning - wondering if Ranma would be ok when he woke up.

The day had _started_ fairly normally: Ranma and Genma engaging in early morning fighting practice. Akane trying her hand at cooking breakfast. The rest of the household finding plausible reasons not to eat it.

With his typical disregard for everyone around him while fighting with Genma, Ranma had managed to plant Akane's face in the platter of food she had just spent an hour on. She had then planted the black haired boy in the fishpond: head first. Nothing unusual for a morning in the Tendo household so far.

What wasn't usual was that, when the wave of water had cleared, rather than having a spluttering girl with a red pigtail in the fishpond, there had been an unconscious girl with a red pigtail in the fishpond. With a large lump on her head where she had bounced off a very hard rock.

When she woke up things had started to get strange, even by Tendo dojo standards.

"Why are you talking so weird!"

Akane glowered at Ranma.

"I can't help it, I'm a woman."

The declaration had dumbfounded Akane momentarily. The following explosion from her was awe inspiring, the flight by Ranma from the room unexpected, and the confusion left behind for everyone else in the room, well, confusing.

The rest of the day had been surreal. Akane had stalked Ranma's manhood both through direct assaults of argument and hot water, and sneak attacks such as taking Ranma to the store to buy her some women's clothing. The last had backfired badly. Akane had ended up embarrassed as Ranma had delightedly tried on various bras, panties and other women's clothing. She escaped the store with the relatively minor damage of having bought Ranma a 35,000 yen dress. Of the restroom incident, the less said the better.

By that evening, Akane was worn down. She still didn't believe Ranma's declaration, but she had used nearly all her energy (as well as more than a small chunk of her savings) up for the day. She went to bed, determined to start fresh in the morning.

The midnight knock on her door by a frightened to be alone Ranma, asking to be allowed to sleep in Akane's room had not been welcome, but the night's conclusion at the fishpool had not been an improvement, in hindsight.

'Nnngg...' Ranma stirred, and then blinked her eyes to clear her vision against the morning light. Where? On her futon, in her room. She touched the back of her head. 'Owwww!'. She had tripped and then...and then...she didn't remember after that until she woke up. She must have hit her head again or something. She touched her head again. Definitely hit it. She propped herself up on an elbow and looked at the form of Akane, asleep, slouched over while still sitting next to Ranma's futon.

Oh.

'She stayed up all night watching you, you know.' floated an even male voice from behind Ranma. Ryouga. Of course. He didn't look like he had gotten any sleep, either. Ranma pulled herself into a sitting position, being careful to keep herself covered. 'I thought so,' she said quietly.

'How do you feel?'

From the look in Ryouga's eye, Ranma knew that the question didn't apply just to the bruise on the back of her head:

'Beatup, tired...female.'

Just then, Akane murmured something in her sleep. Ryouga motioned to Ranma to come outside the room. Ranma hesitated, and then wrapped the blanket around Akane's shoulders before leaving. She closed the door gently behind her before turning and facing Ryouga.

'You know. That's why you spend so much time as P-chan.'

Not a question.

Ryouga nodded.

'You never spent much time in your cursed form - I spent MONTHS in mine while still in China. Its not going away. I didn't tell you because I hoped it wouldn't happen to you. Maybe you would be lucky. Maybe I was just unlucky. Maybe a lot of things.'

Softly, 'So what do I do?'

'I don't know. It was different for me. People _eat_ pigs...so I didn't have much of a choice: It was either life as human shaped pig or lunch as a pig shaped human.' Ryouga grimaced. The latter had nearly come true too many times. He still remembered the time Shampoo tried to serve him up for lunch to Ranma.

Ranma understood the source of Ryouga's phenomenal depression now - and why he had never told anyone why. Having the conviction to your soul that your proper form was a pig while actually being *and knowing* you were human would be enough to drive almost anyone into a world class depression. It was a miracle the internal conflict hadn't actually driven Ryouga insane.

In its own way, Ranma's situation was both better and worse than Ryouga's. Better in that she actually _could_ live as a girl and maybe even be accepted. Worse for the same reason - she didn't have the compelling anchor to her original form that kept Ryouga from losing himself to his cursed form.

The tall dark haired boy with the yellow bandana looked with bleak eyes at the short redheaded girl.

'Welcome to Hell.'

It had been two weeks now, and Akane was in a white rage. She couldn't take it out on Ranma. For starters it would be like kicking a puppy, and second off she couldn't lay a finger on her anyway. Ranma's speed advantage as a girl was insurmountable: Ranma didn't want to fight, and was fast enough to make sure she didn't have to.

'Hiiyaaa!' crash

plonk

'Hiiyaaa!' crash

plonk

The sound of cinderblock after cinderblock being reduced to gravel went on until Akane ran out of cinderblocks. She had gotten so good at demolishing the blocks that Ranma had begun to wonder if she had mastered Ryouga's breaking point technique somehow: When she was done, what had to be accomplished for clean up was better accomplished with a broom than by picking up the individual pieces.

Akane came inside, her gi plastered to her from the sweat of her workout, her hair...limp. Ranma peeked at her from around the corner at the top of the staircase, deciding if she would have to run or not.

'Come _down_ from there, Ranma!', snapped Akane. 'I'm not going to attack you. I've calmed down.'

Ranma slowly came down the stairs, but looked ready to bolt at the first hint of trouble. Akane might have come down from the absolute rage she had been in, but she was scarcely completely calm.

'What did you think you were doing?!', Akane fumed.

'I *can't* go to the *boy's* gym class! It would be perverted!' Ranma's damnable beaten puppydog eyes trembled as she answered Akane's question.

'Ohhh! YOU!'

Akane moderated her voice somewhat as she saw Ranma prepare to run. It had taken a week of periodically yelling at recently vacated air and a conversation with Kasumi before she had learned to clamp down on her volume when talking to Ranma now.

'You're *NOT* a girl! You're a *GUY*!'

'But...'

This now daily argument wound to its inevitable conclusion of Akane storming to her bedroom and slamming the door behind her.

Ranma sat on the bottom step of the stairs, depressed. The arguments with Akane were the worst of all. She always felt physically ill for hours afterwards. She didn't *want* to upset Akane, it was just that Akane couldn't understand that Ranma's change of perspective wasn't something she *chose*. It just...was the way it was.

Father, Shampoo and Mousse would be spared this, at least. When Ranma and Ryouga had talked with Cologne, she had quickly figured out a formula would prevent that part of the curse from taking effect. Unfortunately, it had to be used _before_ it activated. It was of no use to either Ryouga or Ranma.

Cologne was of the opinion that it was irreversable once it took full effect, and they were inclined to believe her: She might be a wrinkled little monster, but she had 300 years of experience to draw on. And with the tight reign she had on Shampoo, that problem had really ended before it started.

Although, Ranma hadn't quite known what to make of Cologne's sardonic comment of 'how would you tell the difference?' just before administering the formula to Genma...

Sitting on the stairs thinking about that, she didn't hear her father approach.

'Boy.'

'Boy.'

'BOY!'

Ranma jumped at the shout. She hadn't heard the first two calls, but she would have had to be more than deaf to miss the third.

'You're breaking your father's heart!'

Oh no. Time for speech number five. She really didn't want to hear it, but it would be disrespectful to refuse to listen.

'How can you do this? Don't you care that this means the end of the Anything Goes School of Martial Arts?' The speech wound through how his father had spent his whole life preparing Ranma to take over the school, and so on...and so on...and so on...

She finally escaped by telling him she had to help Kasumi prepare dinner. Ranma had always been a good cook, the practice she got with Kasumi was turning her into an outstanding one. Combined with Genma's enslavement to his stomach, it had stalled him long enough for her to vanish into the kitchen.

She had been spending more and more time helping Kasumi, not just because she really liked cooking and other homemaking things (which she did, actually), but because it provided a space where no one tried to convince her to 'change her mind'. Kasumi never did that – perhaps instinctively understanding that while people could do as they wished, they couldn't always wish as they wished. Whatever the reason, Ranma was grateful to her for her support.

Ranma had gone into hypercute mode initially. The overreaction to her new situation was caused by the combination of her recently acquired emotional filters (well bred girls in 500 or so AD were not normally taught to be swaggeringly independant) and her own upbringing as the male heir to 'School of Anything Goes Martial Arts' (with a less than informed male Satome perspective of what it meant to actaully be a woman).

The resulting bout of hypercuteness had lasted about a week before Ranma began to realize that she didn't *have* to be quite that extreme. But it would be a _long_ time before she would ever feel comfortable taking the lead in anything over a man: Neither her upbringing as Saotome Genma's son nor her emotions from the drowned girl of fifteen hundred years earlier gave any support to her for that.

She was still _quite_ cute - and some things more fundamental about her would never return to what they were before.

Akane was openly contemptuous of Ranma's "squeemishness" about blood. When Ranma had gotten her first period, Akane had been absolutely no help. It had been Kasumi who had calmed the panicked Ranma down and explained what was happening to her. She had never stayed in her female form long enough for it to happen to her before.

The same went for Ranma's new found pacificism, her enthusiasm towards doing housework, and above all her reaction to guy's underclothes while doing laundry.

But the thing that ultimately led to disaster was the hair.

'I can't believe you!'

Sitting with both legs folded neatly beneath her, Ranma kept her eyes on the low table as Akane stormed, but didn't respond.

'And you!'

Rounding on Kasumi now, Akane continued, 'You actually helped Ranma do it!'

Kasumi responded very mildly, 'Now Akane, it _is_ her hair.'

'Ranma isn't a she at all! He's just a stupid _PERVERT_!'

Akane glared at Ranma, daring her to dispute the statement.

The hair in question was neatly trimmed into a midback tail, quite full, and very feminine over the flower print kimono Ranma was wearing. Nothing unusual, unless you consider that up until about thirty minutes earlier it had been a thin eight inch braided ponytail, tied with a dragon's whisker. The whisker was still present, but now hidden in a scarf that acted as a gather for the end of the flowing hair.

To achieve that remarkable transformation, Ranma had removed the dragon's whisker and suffered being changed into a male long enough for explosive hair growth to change the short braid into a long mane. The growth itself was the result of one of those accidents that seemed to always plague Saotome Ranma: he had inadvertantly eaten a dragon's whisker while training in China - a side effect of which was wild hair growth. Growing the whole length to below midback had taken less than twenty seconds. The whisker stopped the growth in her male form, and the out of control growth effect didn't affect her female form. She kept the whisker 'just in case'.

After Ranma changed (with relief) back into her female form, Kasumi had trimmed the red hair into an attractive tail and showed her how to brush and maintain it. Akane's outrage had boiled over when she had walked into Kasumi's room after dinner and found her sister arranging the scarf that tied the end of Ranma's new mane of hair.

'Its bad enough that pervert is doing this, but you're helping him!'

Attracted by the yelling, the other members of the Tendo household began drifting into Kasumi's room from their various post-dinner activities. Nabiki's reaction on seeing the new look of Ranma's hair was delight: Kuno-baby would pay a _fortune_ for the pictures. She would be able to raise the price at least 5,000 yen per shot...

Tendo Soun and Saotome Genma's reactions were considerably less favorable.

'Saotome, I think this has gone far enough.'

Genma nodded solemnly in agreement, and they simultaneously grabbed for the seated girl, a pair of scissors materializing in Genma's hand from Kasumi's dresser top. The chase that ensued did quite a bit of damage to all six major surfaces of the room, but Ranma was too fast to be caught that way. When they had finally pressed her too hard, she had escaped out of Kasumi's window, leaving Genma and Soun behind, panting and empty handed.

After a long time looking out the window, Genma spoke without turning around.

'Tendo.'

'Yes.'

'I've got a plan.'

Genma looked ridicuously satisfied with himself talking to Ranma's back as she sat on the edge of the dojo entrance next to Akane.

'If you won't be a man and carry on the Saotome School of Anything Goes Martial Arts, I will have no choice but to disown you and tell your mother that you died while training.'

The words from her father froze Ranma in shock. The hope of someday being re-united with her mother as parent and child had always been Ranma's most cherished dream. Every visit by 'Auntie Saotome' was always an internal battle to fight the urge to reveal who 'Ranko' really was.

Genma was saying that he was going to take that dream away from her, and more, was going to disown Ranma, leaving her with no family at all. In order to fight it, she would have to reveal her secret to her mother - which would result in her and her father's death at Nodoka's hands, making good on that incredibly stupid promise her father had made when they had left home so long ago.

The alternative was to deny _everything_ that she was now, marry Akane, and live a violent life as a man and martial artist for the rest of her life. It was the kind of slimy plan only Saotome Genma would have come up with. He was undoubtedly sure that Ranma would cave in and do as he wished. What it didn't account for was that Ranma's pacificism and identity as a girl went down to her core now. She _couldn't_ live that way. It would kill her as surely as Nodoka's sword.

As the full scope of the trap her father had put her in became apparent to her, the blood drained from her cheeks, leaving them a pale white against the dusk.

Only Akane really saw Ranma's face before she lept into the twilight outside the dojo: What she had seen there had caused her to race after Ranma, leaving Genma and her father standing in the doorway, mystified by the two girls reactions.

It wasn't like the times Ranma had run from fights at the dojo before. Ranma had just been avoiding violence then. Not this time. There had been hopeless despair in Ranma's eyes when she leaped into the night - the look of someone who had nothing to keep on living for. Even Ryouga at his worst never had looked quite like that. This had scared Akane.

Akane had never followed Ranma before when she fled fights at the dojo before. She had just assumed that Ranma would return eventually. She wasn't sure that would happen this time - Ranma's face had been...had been...

When she had finally caught up with the fleeing girl, they were at a foot bridge crossing the river. Ranma hadn't noticed Akane's arrival, too caught up in her pain. The tears visible on Ranma's cheeks had rocked Akane to her heels. Ranma? Crying?

She hadn't ever seen Ranma cry before. Oh, a few tears had been squeezed out of his eyes by sheer pain once or twice when he had really been hurt during a fight, but that wasn't crying: _This_ was the weeping of a soul beyond hope.

In the months since Ranma had hit her skull in the fishpond, Akane had been relentless in her harassment of what she thought of as "Ranma's Girl Act". For the first time in that entire time, she seriously thought about the possibility that it wasn't an act, and that it wasn't going to change a whole lot. It was very hard for her to even consider it since if it wasn't an act, Akane had committed two incredibly horrible crimes against the person in front of her.

From one perspective, it could be argued that she had killed her fiance (even if she hadn't meant to), and done her best to make life a hell for an innocent girl ever since. That was a bitter pill to swallow. But from that point of view, she owed the girl in front of her in ways she might never be able to repay.

It was indeed a bitter pill - Akane's own cheeks were damp by the time she finished swallowing it. This was nothing on the grief that would come later when she paid her private respects to her ex-fiance, but for now it was enough to determine her actions. She would settle things with her father later. Whatever else happened, Ranma was _NOT_ going to be without a family.

The words were almost the first ones she had ever said to Ranma, before she had found out that the 'girl' she had just met was a boy cursed to take the body of a girl. She had written them in her journal in sarcastic anger that day, and read them many times since when she was angry at Ranma. This time, they meant much more than they had when she had originally spoken them, and carried no sarcastic intent. Perhaps it would give Ranma a small new reason to continue to live.

She opened her mouth, and in the dark night beneath a Tokyo bridge, said the words that closed the chapter of her life when she had been engaged to a boy named Ranma:

"I'm Akane."

"Would you like to be friends?"


End file.
